The Experience Module

The Future is back home

Tomorrow is happening in Ivrea, but it has always been like this: the city has always been at the frontier of innovation and has been able to combine it with the social and cultural needs of its inhabitants. Roads that were developing in the rest of the world, in Ivrea already existed.

An extraordinary example of experimenting with new and beneficial relationships between history and modernity, industry and the countryside, innovation and tradition.

The choice was not difficult: ICO Academy is at home in Ivrea, a concrete city experiment that has found in industry a strong and exceptionally kind idea to embrace for a harmonious development, on a human scale, in balance with the surrounding environment. An unmistakable style and appreciated all over the world, as demonstrated by the appointment to UNESCO heritage in 2018, as Ivrea, Industrial City of the 20th Century.

We are proud of Ivrea heritage, a unique place in the world that we want to make a new point of reference.

For this reason, in each course there will be an Experience Module to let the participants enter the walls where the first typing machine was realized, from which the Olivetti epic began. A visit to the UNESCO heritage enlivened by small gastronomic pleasures to taste the delights of Canavese cuisine.

Nietzsche said he had to be conscious of the past and consciously forget it to build the future. An idea that perfectly summarizes the objective of the Experience Module: to make known what has made Ivrea unique in its genre so that it can be a showcase to admire and from which to draw inspiration to lay the pillars of a well-founded, better, shared future.

Always a hub of talents

The Canavese is a corner of Piedmont that keeps naturalistic, historical and artistic treasures, like the Morainic Amphitheater formed during the great glaciations, the Serra d'Ivrea and the five lakes close to the city.

But also cultural excellences have passed through modern and contemporary history in Ivrea: the historical narrator Carlo Botta, the liberal politician Massimo d'Azeglio, the poet Guido Gozzano, the diplomat and versifier Costantino Nigra, the writer Salvator Gotta, above all the famous librettist and playwright Giuseppe Giacosa.

Between 1930s and 1960s, Adriano Olivetti transformed Ivrea into an alternative design to the national and international experiences of the 20th century, giving life to his own industrial and socio-cultural project visible in a balanced development model based on a syneresis between companies and workers.

Pride, History, Community have made it possible to preserve and pass on this exceptional memory together with the hope of a renewal for future generations. A mission that culminated in the nomination of the city as a UNESCO heritage site in 2018, as Ivrea, Industrial City of the 20th Century.

In it, Olivetti's factory culture and the experience of the Community Movement have involved architects and urban planners from all over Italy to design the city in a far-sighted manner and coping with what was best for its inhabitants: from industrial buildings to those for services, up to the residences for workers and schools for their children. Artifacts that materialize the culture and thought of Adriano Olivetti, a union between the new expressive capacity of these modern architectures and the recognition of their being part of an economic and social project permeated by the community proposal.

After all, a heritage that ICO Academy makes its own without breaking with the past, drawing from the Olivetti’s experience the tradition of brilliance, industriousness and savoir-faire and combining them with contemporary themes about:

Technology

Innovation

Design

Culture

Welfare

Social Issues

Ivrea Città Industriale